October 14, 2024.

There was a singular moment, then, after a long, satisfactory dinner of conversation and fellowship, as he stacked one dirty dish atop another to pass along to his wife, who was at the sink up to her elbows with suds, laughing at a joke told by her father she’d heard a thousand times before, but laughing with tears in the corners of her blue eyes as if it was the first time... and he was surrounded by beloved friends, beloved family, happy chatter, the warmth of the kitchen, and outside the leaves were collecting on the ground in a lazy carpet that signified the arrival of fall, and children chased each other with sticks and discovered whole new worlds under overturned stones, and at this singular moment, he felt all the collected beauty of the world converge here, in this kitchen, with these people, and his mind reeled with devastating, immense, profound love, with the importance of this, here, now, and he was overwhelmed with the need to tell them, to let them know how beautiful and special each of them were, how…

“Do you…” he started, but too quietly, his voice trembling with emotion, and no one heard him over his wife’s father telling another old joke, and he realized he did not know what words to say, and he tried, desperately, to hold onto that feeling, still surging within him, and he opened his mouth again, then closed it, then opened it again, and he said, again, “Do you…” and his oldest friend turned to him, face still grinning from another conversation, and his oldest friend said “What’s that?” but he found himself incapable of putting it into words, representing this unbearable beauty in any comprehensible way, he just shook his head, smiled meekly, kept handing over dirty dishes, the clear, perfect images of crystallized beauty crumbling within him each passing moment he found himself unable to describe any of it, until it was gone, until the moment had lapsed into a hazy, incomplete memory, until he had lost that moment, that feeling, forever.

That lost moment planted itself in him like a seed, twisting roots through him, and with each setback in his life it grew, breaking him apart, if only he’d said something, even a clumsy, halting thing, incomplete but grasping at the whole, he could have preserved some of that beauty, kept the friends from growing apart and forgetting their love for one another and then forgetting one another entirely, kept at bay the little squabbles that grew into squalls that tore his family apart, kept away the doubt and self-loathing that grew in him each day, hating his own cowardice and stupidity, until it obsessed him, until it drove his wife to resent him, until it drove her to leave him entirely and seek solace in the arms of someone better, more whole, more capable of expressing themselves.

The moment was gone forever, and losing it destroyed him, and as he stared at the notebook open before him on the scratched and stained plastic kitchen table, even now, decades later, a lifetime later, he was still unable to express, explain, even to himself, how any of this happened.

So he left the page blank, hoping that where words failed him, maybe whoever discovered his body, a week from now, two weeks from now, could see, could intuit, some of the beauty he had seen in his life.